The Missing Piece to Your Food Truck’s Social Media Strategy

The Missing Piece to Your Food Truck’s Social Media Strategy

Does your food truck have a social media strategy? Not sure what a social media strategy consists of? Don’t worry, you aren’t alone.

Social media is one of the most important areas of the mobile food industry that gets neglected by food truck vendors. Nearly all of the new food trucks that have come online over the last few years have created social media accounts, many of them just haven’t found the proper way to maximize their use.

While it may seem simple enough to start up a Twitter account and start posting your upcoming locations, there is much more to social media marketing than sending out the address or intersection you plan to park.

3 Points To Consider In Your Food Truck Social Media Strategy

Listening

Listening to your local market is one of the most important things that social media allows food truck owners to do. It allows you, to follow trending conversations, curb dissatisfaction with proper customer service and to win over those second guessers. Before social media, marketing was considered a monologue like talking in an empty room, or underwater for that matter. Social media has brought your customers to the party and now it’s up to you to mingle, to create connections that are relevant and that could potentially benefit your mobile food business.

Diversification

When building a strategy for your online campaign and social media accounts you must consider diversification. Instead of strictly targeting the individuals who may eventually be found in line at your truck, include messages to others in your community as well such as food and equipment suppliers, commercial kitchens, fellow food truck owners, etc. By starting with a diversified manner in mind there is more opportunity for your mobile food business to grow in multiple directions (catering, events or products that can be sold by business partners).

Diversifying your market helps to build segment pools for your target market which would eventually lead into a primary segment, a secondary, and so on. Building pools early in the launch allows food truck owners to see which demographic they are getting the most reactions from. The segmented pools also suggest which segments deserve more attention and allocated resources. The only thing to be careful with when you diversify your market is the content you share, will it offend some people or will it be shared with positivity?

Branding

Branding is a very important element in running your social media accounts. Anyone should be capable of building an image of what their food truck business is all about through the content that they share. Make sure the content you share is relevant, consistent and witty in some manner to encourage people to engage, share or like it. Although, those cute images of kittens are cute you have to ask yourself if this is consistent with your food truck’s branding. Then again, isn’t that what personal pages are for?

So are all of these points part of your social media strategy? If not…what are you doing wasting time here :). Get to work!!!

Richard is an architect by degree (Lawrence Technological University, Southfield, Michigan) who began his career in real estate development and architectural planning. In September of 2010 he created Mobile Cuisine Magazine to fill an information void he found when he began researching how to start a mobile hotdog cart in Chicago. Richard found that there was no central repository of mobile street food information anywhere on the internet, and with that, the idea for MCM was born.